The first thing I noticed was a fridge door. The cover art of ‘everyone’s a baby’ showcases a paper butterfly, a magnet, a photograph of small children, a grocery list and stuff that your parents accumulate over time. Clutter that nobody curates and everybody has, held up by whatever is stuck to the door at the time. It is a good piece of cover art because it tells you the terms of the record before you’ve even played the first song.
Danish Sood’s debut mixtape is not a statement project; it is a household. And the things pinned to it matter mostly to the person who put them there. Running under fourteen minutes, the collection of 7 songs behaves exactly the way that image suggests it will, which is to say it is small, warm, quick, and considerably more replayable than it has any obligation to be.
The sound of the tape
The production carries most of the tape, which is strewn together in the best sense. Elements drift in and out around the vocals rather than sitting under them. It is catchy in a way that has less to do with hooks than with restlessness. The influences are worn openly and are almost entirely Western: this does not sound like an Indian indie mixtape, and the comparisons it invites are the ones Danish names himself, Dijon and Mk.gee and Dominic Fike, along with Justin Bieber’s Swag, an album whose looseness clearly gave him permission. “I’ve always been more attracted to indie pop and more attracted to indie music rather than just fully pop out there,” he says. “I made a reference list as well of the songs that I really love listening to, and only when I started listening to them more and more did I get attracted to it.” None of this is new sound, exactly. It is simply fresh, which is a different and more useful quality, and one that has a lot to do with how fast the record was made.
How it got made
The short version is that he lost some songs and gained a method. Sometime in the middle of 2025 the masters of an earlier batch of tracks went missing, technical faults, files nobody could find, and rather than wait he put himself in a room. “I did a small kind of a camp with myself,” he says. “The room had just me in the beginning, and there was no booth or anything, I just made small scratches of the songs I wanted to do.” One rule held the whole thing together. “I won’t keep going back to re-record, re-change, re-do everything,” he says. “If I feel it is it, it is it, otherwise you’ll keep working on it again and again, and then it’s a spiral that you wouldn’t want yourself to be in.”
You can hear that rule in the finished thing, and it is the reason the mixtape has the texture it does. A friend came in later to record him and stayed on to add keys and small elaborations. “He’s like a sculptor,” Danish says, but the brief didn’t change. “If it gets too produced then I’ll have to get into the nitty-gritty of things, and then it might never see the light of day.” The title is a description of the mindset required to put it out at all. “I had to be a baby enough to release this,” he says. “When you’re a baby about things, you wouldn’t care what other people think, because your mind is not curated to think like that.”
The standout tracks
Butterfly Tattoo is the one. The production is nowhere near the most elaborate here, and it does not need to be, because the vocal carries it, the emotion lands cleanly, the writing stays specific enough to be relatable without spelling anything out, and the whole thing has the easy head-nodding pull of a song built for a good mood rather than an important one. It is the track most likely to follow you around after the mixtape ends.
By My Side is the other, and it works by doing almost the opposite. It is heavier and moodier, the voice sitting low and distorted, mixed in with the chatter of people at a get-together so that you are listening from somewhere just outside the room. Then the music switches near the end and lifts, and that turn is the single most satisfying moment on the record.
The vocal treatment is applied liberally across all seven songs, and it is not always doing the same amount of work. On the better tracks it dissolves the voice into the production so that the two arrive as one thing. On others it is simply there, a texture applied out of habit rather than intent, adding no particular meaning to the song underneath it. This is the flip side of the no-second-takes rule: what it protects in immediacy it occasionally spends in variety, and by the end you notice the sameness of the treatment more than any individual use of it.
The mixtape closes with a voice note from his mother, built into a guitar melody and a drum pattern he had already arranged. She has always sent them, from Delhi to wherever he was working. “I’m kind of relating the amount of care that I feel from someone with someone that I have been born by,” he says. It is a sentimental move that avoids being cloying because it is not performed, it is just a recording of a real thing, dropped in and left alone, the way you might leave a photo stuck to a fridge for years without thinking about it.
The verdict
This is a late summer record, and releasing it in July was the right instinct. It is a single-sitting listen or the sort of thing to put on while you move around the house doing chores, and its brevity is a feature rather than a shortfall. Danish is honest about where it sits in his own arc, “I’ll never get to be this young, this naive and this innocent about my music, so I had to start it like this” and with a Hindi project and an R&B EP already lining up behind it, the interesting part is what a more considered version of this sensibility sounds like. On this evidence, worth waiting for.
